Surface Mount Assembly Techniques for the Hobbyist

I saw an article in IEEE Spectrum Magazine recently with some techniques that a hobbyist could use for surface mount assembly.  It is clearly obvious that with the small size of surface mount components nowadays the hobbyist can hardly rely on breadboards and the old soldering iron anymore.  It is well within the reach of the hobbyist to fabricate printed circuit boards through cheap board vendors such as Express PCB (they even give you free PCB design tools).  For the assembly, wouldn't it be nice to have a reflow oven?  Well, the article states that you could modify a simple toaster oven to function as a reflow oven [1].  I thought this was ingenious so I started doing some internet searching.  I quickly came to a site that provides a controller board to turn a toaster oven into a reflow oven (The Silicon Horizon).  The controller board uses PID temperature control to control the temperature inside the oven and interfaces to a PC where a user can monitor the temperature profile, and even create custom profiles for the controller to run.  The cost of the controller board is only $59.  There are several other external parts required (solid state relay, thermocouple, toaster oven), so the total cost would be higher but probably easily under $200 for a good setup.   I am always amazed at how many smart people there are in the world, making do with what they have to achieve amazing things.  I'm beginning to gain confidence that getting a new idea into hardware may not present impossible barriers to entry for very small companies or individuals.

[1] Wallich, Paul. August 2007. "Deeply Superficial." IEEE Spectrum. Vol. 44, No. 8.